Abstract
In 1929, the Australian architect and author William Hardy Wilson (1881–1950) identified architectural practice within Australia as degenerate and in decline. He attributed this regression not to changing tastes or styles but to the increasing number of native-born architects and their long-term exposure to a subtropical or tropical climate. Wilson believed that Australia’s warmer climates negatively affected the nation’s future capacity for innovation and invention and the development of national style. Central to Wilson’s thesis was the proposition that climate was the primary determinant of artistic agency. The importance of this idea was twofold. First, it enabled Wilson to develop a critique of the White Australia policies which were introduced in 1901 and which grew in influence in the early decades of twentieth-century Australia. Second, it helped Wilson to locate Australian architectural practice within a global theory of civilisation. In documenting the crisis that Wilson saw within the architecture of Australia, the paper considers this aspect of his work in detail for the first time.
Highlights
In 1929, the Australian architect and author William Hardy Wilson (1881–1950) identified architectural practice within Australia as degenerate and in decline
* The University of Queensland, Australia d.vanderplaat@uq.edu.au nies of New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia—Wilson identified the architecture of colonial Australia as being of a greater quality than that which was produced in his own age
The global progress of civilisation, like the architecture of Australia, had come to an ‘inevitable pause’ (Wilson 1929: 266–70, 90): All signs show that we have arrived at one of those great changes when mankind moves from one period of creativeness, which has come to an end, towards another, which has not appeared
Summary
In 1929, the Australian architect and author William Hardy Wilson (1881–1950) identified architectural practice within Australia as degenerate and in decline. It was geographically remote from mainland Europe, a distance that prevented the sort of contact long established between the British people and their primary creative source, the European continent: Thereafter architecture steadily declined, and as architects came to Australia from the Homeland they found more difficulty in designing as well as they were accustomed as the proportion of native born Australians increased.
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